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Tagged as Part 1 of the Aftermath series (Part 2 of which is the already-reviewed Reviviscence), Rescue 9-1-Freeman is a decent 3-level pack in its own right, by author Tyler Munden (aka TylAK), who is now the lead mapper on the popular mod Firearms. Though it sports a fairly mundane design, the gameplay is pretty good, and this one is worth picking up.

Your mission in Rescue 9-1-Freeman, as the title may suggest, is to rescue an imprisoned scientist so that he may continue his research on Xen. Although this does supply a believable plot, the rescue-the-scientist mission was really fleshed out in other episodes such as Saving Bob and especially Deliverance. Here it is merely a backdrop, as there is extremely little time spent with the scientist one you’ve found him, and it’s terribly simple to defend him from the two enemies you encounter after liberating him.

I was looking forward to this mod because I really enjoyed the author’s only Half-Life 2 release, called Das Roboss but unfortunately this one crashed so many times on me that it was impossible to enjoy.

I even considered not adding it, but this is the first part of a two part series called Aftermath and I wanted to post both parts.

Of course, you may be lucky and it could work for you, so fingers crossed.

The layout is plain and quite standard, so there’s nothing really to look at, but the gameplay is quite fun.

The stealth section is okay, yes only okay, but I always enjoy using the crossbow, so that made me smile.

The ending never worked and the scientist would fall out of the truck and the doors never opened. Hoping for much better tomorrow in part 2.

From reading the reviews I wasn’t expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Its a little slow overall but I did have a modicum of fun!

The above installation instructions didn’t work for me, I had to put the .bsp files and graphs into the Valve maps folder, run HL and type ” map Res1″ (the author instructs that the ” R” is capitalised to avoid transition problems). This didn’t crash once so I think Phillip’s problem might have been an installation problem.

To be fair this is not one for anyone who likes hard gameplay, but for me it did what I want from a game, to pass a little time and enjoy myself.

The look and feel was pretty much BM style fare, although the combat could have done with being a little less easy and the puzzles (such as they were) don’t need a genius to figure them out. At the end of the day the mod is much more fun than the previous 4 releases in the 100.

As for the ending, shoot any of the barnacles and the end titles come up whether you’re in the truck or not and it’s worth reading the end titles as the are mildly amusing.

Well this one was OK, although there’s really not much substance here. This is one of Tyler’s early releases, and of course he went on to much bigger and better things. I’m perhaps a bit generous giving a Maybe – the experience is still decent and the maps are OK, but there’s nothing here to get excited about.

This pack is a fairly short and linear set of 3 maps. There’s a basic story about rescuing a scientist, and the only twist is that you have to play through a section near the end in “stealth” mode. No grunts can see you, and you can’t trip the tripmines. As much as I hate forced stealth sections in Half-Life maps, this one is pretty harmless since it’s easy other than a couple of tricky jumps.

And that really goes for the pack as well – it’s terribly easy and I found the hardest thing to be a couple of jumps over a chasm. It’s worth playing if you’re a Half-Life fan. It’s decent.

The only way I could get this to run without crashing on map changes was also to put the maps in valve/maps and load map Res1 from the console.

The difficulty of this map pack was incredibly easy and offers no challenge at all. At the end there is a stealth mission which I was expecting to be hard, but it was actually easier than the other parts of the mod. This map pack also has buggy doors which can kill you if you stand next to them and can also bug up the closing sound. Then we get to the level transitions. First time I went through one I was stuck miles outside of the second map, and the rest of the times I went through them I crashed. This mod certainly wasn’t my idea of fun.

Ok this is in the perfect gameplay time I mean u can beat it in a matter of 1/2 hr or less, and the gameplay is dynamic but really afected by the crashing bugs in the changemaps, I had to charge the 2 out of three manually and using impulse 101, so that’s a pretty bad point. Also that last sthealthy section was cool and had so much more potential but is quite easy if u beat it with the crosbow I think and I recomend to beat it with that as the main weapon, so yeah I think overall this feels like a play it latter definetly.

Way better than Tylaks first (??) map, “Total Evasion” but still nothing special, too easy, except for the jumping scene with the breakable boxes, fell 2 times there, well I think modders should be always include an easy way, so new players won’t die often..

It also is too short again and lacks of atmosphere and design.
At least there were some newer ideas like the stealth part, and I liked the dead end at the houndeye’s (GRRRRR!!)
That the scientist waits until I clean out all soldiers is a a good script to me, just like some other lil scripts in this mod.

The conclusion is, if you wanna do a short shooting, play it, but that’s it then.